Andy Munro talks about Blues’ friendly at Burton and the ongoing problems at St Andrews.
Having been hassled by Hasselbank’s boyz, and with a current big fat Zzlch on key signings, I’m beginning to feel a bit deflated. In fact, almost as deflated as if Lee Clark had come back to manage, Pannu had been reinstated as acting chairman and the Villa had signed Demi Gray for £1 million.
In reality, things aren’t quite that bad but I’ve now lowered my wildly optimistic sights to a more pragmatic lower-mid table position. To be brutal, it would be a nonsense to expect more when a Championship club like Middlesbrough can put in a £14 million bid for a player and ‘little’ Brentford can splash out £5 million on a couple of overseas prospects.
Tesche is now apparently staying at Forest and Fabrini is set to go to moneybags ‘Boro, who can obviously pay him more than our wage ceiling of ten bob a week. Blues just can’t compete and it’s not going to get any easier as the Championship becomes silted up with teams still living off the fat of the Premier League.
You can’t blame Rowett and you can’t blame Panos, it’s just another fine mess that the Chinese Laurel and Hardy (Yeung and Pannu) have gotten us into. Chris Hughton saw the writing on the wall when he got a mediocre side to outperform and move mountains before he departed – Gary Rowett must now be feeling the same but hopefully he’s made of sterner stuff.
Of course, a loss in a friendly needn’t be tragic (when Lee Clark was manager an impressive beating of a top German Bundesliga side was followed by a disasterous start to a season). However, football is about confidence so let’s hope we don’t get whipped against Leicester.
Maybe, we should start blooding some more youngsters and also take a punt on the Togolese Zigic, Mwapa. Eitherway, the likes of Shinnie, Novak,Davies, Spector and Gleeson spell mediocrity and are never going to lead us into the play offs. Let’s hope that I’m wrong but, fair play to Rowett he made it plain that he won’t be adding to that mediocrity for the sake of it.